German Döner, English Curry & American Pizza

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/07/2026 à 06:51

German Döner Kebab restaurants have started popping up all over London. For some reason, the idea of a German kebab still strikes me as slightly incongruous - a bit like a Swiss curry or a French taco. However, according to a recent analysis of OpenStreetMap food venues, there are far more döner kebab restaurants in Germany than there are in Turkey. In fact, 51% of the world's döner shops are

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Bigfoot's Giant Step Forward for Tourism Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/07/2026 à 07:26

Tourism websites often present destinations using static maps, brochures and carefully curated lists of attractions. Bigfoot's BC demonstrates that there is a much more engaging alternative. By turning British Columbia into a playful 3D world that visitors can explore as a giant Sasquatch, it transforms the traditional tourist guide into an interactive adventure.Built with three.js and powered

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The Most Optimal Road Trip Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/07/2026 à 07:19

In 1954, a landmark paper in computer science famously solved the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) by proving the exact, shortest route to visit all 48 contiguous state capitals plus Washington D.C. The underlying puzzle is deceptively simple: given a list of destinations, what is the shortest possible route that visits each location once before returning to the start? That breakthrough

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The Many Maps of the Odyssey

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 26/07/2026 à 13:41

Since the launch of the Google Maps API back in 2005, two fictional journeys have been mapped over and over again: Phileas Fogg’s global circumnavigation in Around the World in Eighty Days, and Odysseus’ long voyage home in the Odyssey.For some reason Homer’s hero is having a bit of a moment - and a sudden surge of new Odyssey maps means Odysseus seems to have pulled ahead of

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Free Map Tiles for Everyone

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/07/2026 à 07:45

Free Map Tiles Providers:OpenFreeMapVersaTilesMaptoolkit.orgOne of the biggest barriers to building web maps has always been the cost and complexity of map tiles. Services such as Google Maps and Mapbox offer excellent infrastructure, but commercial pricing can quickly become prohibitive as projects grow. Self-hosting OpenStreetMap vector tiles is an alternative, but maintaining a global tile

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Can You Date the Map? - Daily Challenge

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/07/2026 à 07:57

Randall Munroe's famous xkcd comic Map Age Guide distilled two centuries of global geopolitics into a wonderfully simple flowchart for dating maps. Does the map show Germany divided into East and West? Is there a Yugoslavia? Does South Sudan exist? By answering a handful of such questions about borders and country names, the comic demonstrates how you can usually work out when almost any modern

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How Close is Everything You Need?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/07/2026 à 07:46

One of the biggest challenges when moving home is deciding which compromise you are prepared to make. You might want to live close to work, a good school, a supermarket, a park, a gym and your favourite coffee shop - but finding somewhere that sits within easy reach of everything is rarely possible.Close is an interactive travel-time map of the United States designed to solve exactly that

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The 5 Best 3D Subway Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/07/2026 à 08:18

Shinjuku Station has a well-earned reputation as one of the world's largest and most bewildering transport hubs. The  Shinjuku Station Indoor interactive 3D map tackles that complexity by turning the station's official indoor mapping data into a clean, schematic three-dimensional blueprint. This map strips everything back to the essential geometry of corridors, platforms and rooms, making

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Street Names - As Ranked by the Internet

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/07/2026 à 07:42

Streetnames by Elo is a fascinating interactive map which colours streets according to how highly the internet rates the people, places or things they are named after. The map combines OpenStreetMap's `name:etymology:wikidata` tags with EloEverything's crowd-sourced Elo rankings to create a surprisingly revealing view of the world's street names.EloEverything asks users to choose which of two

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SimCity Meets AI: Exploring New York’s New Digital Twin

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/07/2026 à 07:07

NYCSim is a truly impressive digital twin for New York City. Part real-time spatial platform and part living sandbox, this browser-based simulator allows you to explore a virtual Manhattan from the comfort of your own home. By pulling in live municipal transit data, real-time air quality metrics, and local weather feeds, the platform transforms a static city plan into a living, breathing map.&

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The Global Map of Agricultural Decline

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/07/2026 à 06:29

This animated map reveals how agricultural productivity is expected to be affected by climate change around the world throughout this century. It uses the new Climate-Driven Agricultural Decline Index (CADI) to show where and how global heating is likely to alter crop-growing conditions.According to the Climate-Driven Agricultural Decline Index, more than 640 million people already live in

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Where's Downtown?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/07/2026 à 07:13

Where is Downtown? is an interactive map surveying tool designed to crowdsource the boundaries of "downtown" for any city. The process is very simple:Enter the name of a city into the search barDraw your perceived outline of "downtown" on the mapView a heatmap of all the collective responses submitted so farIf you are only interested in exploring where others think downtown is, you can skip

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This is Still Not Normal

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 15/07/2026 à 06:16

Last month I posted a review of Klimadashboard's European Heat Tracker, which visualizes how many people across Europe are exposed to extreme heat in real time. Since then, temperatures have continued to exceed seasonal norms across much of the continent, and new mapped visualizations have continued to document the unfolding heatwaves.  El País' How Extreme is this Heat? uses a

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Fly the Real World Flight Sim

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/07/2026 à 07:46

TripGeo Air is an impressive new browser-based flight simulator that lets you fly over a photorealistic 3D model of the real world.What makes TripGeo Air particularly fun - besides the thrill of flying over your favorite landmarks - is the game's progression tasks. New pilots begin with simple circuit training before unlocking a series of paid jobs, including sightseeing flights, cargo

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The World's Greatest Train Journeys

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/07/2026 à 06:33

If you've ever looked at a railway map and wondered which routes are truly worth travelling, then TrainRouter has the answer. The interactive map showcases 767 of the world's greatest train routes across 118 countries, covering around 372,500 kilometres of railway.Rather than simply displaying rail networks, TrainRouter acts as a curated railway atlas. Every highlighted line has been selected

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The Entire History of Human Warfare

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/07/2026 à 09:53

Launched in late 2025, Prakrit Ojha's War Atlas is an interactive map that visualizes more than 8,500 historical battles. Spanning from 1500 BC to the present day, it offers an immersive, guided tour through the history of human conflict.Now there’s another War Atlas on the scene. Not only does this new map share the same name, a very similar URL, and a nearly identical thematic DNA, it also

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Waterworld

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 10/07/2026 à 07:24

My house disappears under water at around 2 metres of sea level rise. So, hopefully- barring an exceptional storm surge or tsunami - I should be safe for the rest of my lifetime (a global average sea level rise of roughly 0.3-1.0 metres is projected by 2100).You can discover when your own home will be claimed by rising seas using the Sea Level Rise Interactive Map. There are already oceans

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How Maps Save Lives

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/07/2026 à 05:43

Fifty thousand people were killed on February 6, 2023, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck southern and central Türkiye and northern and western Syria. The Night the Earth Shook, Strangers Started to Draw tells the story of how the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and thousands of volunteers responded by rapidly creating detailed maps to support rescue efforts. The Night the Earth

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There are 6,000 Stories in the Naked City

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 08/07/2026 à 05:07

Stories of New York City, Mapped is an interactive map of the New York Times' long-running Metropolitan Diary column. For nearly fifty years, the Metropolitan Diary has been the Times’ home for reader-submitted vignettes, eccentric anecdotes, and overheard snippets of conversation that define life across the five boroughs. By geolocating thousands of these stories, the map creates a fascinating

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How to Turn Interactive Maps into Vector Graphics

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/07/2026 à 05:55

This world map may look like an interactive map but it is actually an image. It is an SVG map of the world that I created in a couple of seconds using Polygrid Map2SVG.One of the great advantages of vector graphics is that they can be scaled to any size without losing quality. Whether you're designing a poster, preparing artwork for print, or producing illustrations for the web, SVG is often the

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Mapping the Light: Sunrise & Sunset

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/07/2026 à 06:00

Sunrise and Sunset is an interactive map that displays the sunrise and sunset times for any location on Earth, for any day of the year. It also visualizes the sun's altitude throughout the seasons.By moving the white dot around the calendar ring, you can change the date to view how daylight hours shift across the year. A yellow curve tracks the sun's altitude above the horizon from dawn to

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Mapping the Origin of Life, the Universe, and Everything

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/07/2026 à 07:59

According to Haudenosaunee tradition, the Earth was once entirely covered by water. One day a muskrat swam to the bottom of the great sea and surfaced with a tiny clump of mud. This mud was placed on the back of a giant turtle, where it grew until it became the earth.This is just one of dozens of creation stories that you can explore on the Origin Myth Map, an interactive atlas of the myths that

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Rainbow Nation

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 03/07/2026 à 05:58

The New York Times has published An American Mosaic, an interactive map visualising the self-identified ancestry of Americans using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. The map is accompanied by an article which explores how today's America reflects centuries of immigration and migration.The map uses colour to show the dominant ancestry in each census tract, drawing on

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The Bureaucracy on Which the Sun Never Sets

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/07/2026 à 06:14

This interactive map traces the journeys of thousands of civil servants who travelled across the globe to administer the British Empire. It turns out that extracting the wealth and resources from the rest of the world required an astonishing amount of bureaucracy.The British Empire was the largest empire in history, at its height governing around a quarter of the world's land surface and

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An Eagle's Eye View of the Alps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 01/07/2026 à 07:27

Have you ever ridden the thermals above the Alps, gliding silently over some of the world's most spectacular mountain scenery? Thanks to OGN 3D Viewer, you can now experience something very close to that -virtually.This new interactive map lets you replay real glider flights in an immersive 3D landscape. Simply enter an airfield's ICAO code (try LFMX, EGHL, KME or CN12) and pick a date to watch

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Geographical Overlords

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 30/06/2026 à 07:30

This morning I listened to the song Geographical Overlord by MastaMic and Titus Chan. What immediately grabbed my attention was that the song's lyrics are a series of questions and statements that might be found in a school geography exam about Hong Kong, e.g.,"Is Lion Rock higher than Fei Ngo Shan?Is Tai Mo Shan higher than Phoenix Mountain?...Gascoigne Road to Hung Hom Tunnel is incredibly

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Mapping Fiction's Greatest Journeys

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/06/2026 à 06:37

Christopher Nolan's epic film adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey opens soon, bringing to the big screen one of fiction's greatest journeys. From Odysseus' ten-year voyage home after the Trojan War to the road trips, quests and adventures of modern novels and films, the journey has long been one of storytelling's most enduring narrative devices.Reading Maps celebrates these fictional journeys by

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This is Not Normal

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/06/2026 à 09:07

In the UK, the hottest June day on record has been broken three days in a row. And it's not just the UK experiencing unprecedented levels of heat. France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have also recorded their highest-ever June temperatures in the past week.You can get a sense of the scale of the heat dome currently sitting over Europe with the European Heat

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3-30-300 Tree Mapping

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 26/06/2026 à 08:45

3-30-300 Tree Analyzer How green is your neighborhood? Urban forestry researchers have long known that access to nature directly impacts our mental health, local temperatures, and climate resilience. To turn these benefits into actionable urban planning targets, Cecil Konijnendijk proposed the 3-30-300 rule. The formula is simple but ambitious: everyone should be able to see at least 3 trees from

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Make TikTok-Ready Video Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/06/2026 à 08:46

At first glance, AniMaps appears to be very slick.It’s a route animator with built-in video export, and it feels made for sharing travel clips on social media. Drop in a global route and it turns it into a smooth, cinematic fly-through using MapLibre GL JS. The camera easing is silky, the line animation feels well-timed, and the whole thing lands right in that sweet spot between data

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Bending the Chart to Fit the Road

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/06/2026 à 08:28

Mapping Collision Density Along the A1 More than 350 years ago, cartographer John Ogilby transformed the way travellers navigated Britain. His famous strip maps turned the nation's principal highways into continuous journeys on the page, allowing travellers to follow routes such as the Great North Road stage by stage across the country. Today's A1 follows much of that same historic

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Mapping in the Dark - with Sonar

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/06/2026 à 07:20

If you are tired of standard map-guessing games that rely on scouring satellite imagery or wandering through street-level panoramas, my new interactive game Sonar City offers a refreshing challenge. This game strips away the visual map entirely, plunging the world into shadow and leaving you with a single tactical tool: a glowing radar array. Your mission - if you choose to accept it - is

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The Rise and Fall of National Rail Networks

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/06/2026 à 09:26

Germany - The German Rail Network from 1835 Until Today Ireland - Irish Railway Stations 1834-2000 Switzerland - A Journey Through the History of Swiss Railways Japan - Japan's Railway from 1872 to todayin 1825 George Stephenson’s Locomotion No. 1 pulled the world’s first steam-powered passenger train along the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Within a decade, the United Kingdom

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Metro Music Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/06/2026 à 07:29

Over a decade ago, Alexander Chen’s iconic MTA.me turned Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 New York subway map into a live, plucking string instrument. On this map every time an MTA train crosses the track of another line, it twangs like a musical string, transforming the frantic energy of New York's transit grid into a delicate, real-time composition.The itch to turn transit data into music has recently

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Jerry's Map Interactive

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 19/06/2026 à 07:24

Most maps capture a moment in time. Jerry's Map has spent more than sixty years doing the exact opposite.Jerry's Map is the life's work of artist Jerry Gretzinger, who began drawing an imaginary city in the summer of 1963. What started as a simple doodle gradually expanded into an immense fictional world. Today, Jerry's Map consists of more than 4,000 individual 8-by-10-inch panels arranged in a

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How Much Room Does a Mushroom Need? - About 110 Quadrillion Kilometres

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/06/2026 à 07:32

Beneath your feet is a vast network of fungi. Not merely "quite large" vast, but vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly vast. If every strand of these underground fungal networks were laid end-to-end, they would stretch from Earth to the Sun about a billion times.To put that into perspective, if you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you nearly 12 years to cover that distance. Yet

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The Reuters Climate Monitor

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/06/2026 à 08:49

Reuters has launched a new Climate Monitor, an impressive interactive globe that allows anyone to see how today's temperatures compare with what used to be considered normal around the world. The map visualizes temperature anomalies in real-time, revealing where conditions are unusually hot or cold compared to historical averages.The interface is beautifully simple. Click anywhere on the globe

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The Real-Time Rat Tracking Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/06/2026 à 07:38

Most transit maps show where people travel. RATFLOW NYC shows where the city's other commuters roam.RATFLOW NYC is a fascinating "data-art" project that visualizes New York City's estimated rat population using public data, probabilistic modelling, and a healthy dose of theatrical flair. Built using NYC Open Data, RATFLOW combines rodent-related 311 complaints with the locations of subway

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Mapping Every Russian Casualty in Ukraine

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 15/06/2026 à 07:58

Vladimir Putin is determined to conceal the enormous human cost of Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine. As a result, Russians are largely denied an accurate accounting of how many of their friends, relatives, and fellow citizens have been killed.To cut through this fog of war, the independent Russian media outlet Mediazona and BBC Russian Service created 200.zona.media, an interactive mapping

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London is in Motion

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/06/2026 à 09:54

Zone One is a live map showing every tube train, bus, riverboat, train, and aircraft moving in real-time across central London. The result is a mesmerizing real-time portrait of London's constantly shifting transportation network.Instead of relying on heavy, off-the-shelf mapping platforms like Google Maps or Mapbox, the project is built from scratch as a high-performance 3D canvas

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Dual Maps Goes 3D

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/06/2026 à 07:41

Dual Maps, an old Maps Mania favorite, has undergone a bit of a makeover this week. As you may have heard, Google recently removed its classic 45° bird's-eye aerial imagery from the Maps JavaScript API. This oblique aerial perspective was one of the core synchronized views offered by Dual Maps. The removal of the bird's-eye view has therefore prompted Map Channels to undertake a ground-up revamp

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How France Sneaked 9 Teams into the World Cup

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/06/2026 à 07:37

There are 99 players born in France in the 2026 World Cup. Each national team can name a squad of only 26 players. This means that 73 players representing other national teams were actually born in France. In other words, there are nearly four full squads' worth of French-born players at the 2026 World Cup.There are 1,248 players participating in the 2026 World Cup in total, and you can view the

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Mapping the Lone Star’s Northern March

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 10/06/2026 à 07:50

Climate change is propelling the lone star tick's habitat northward. This expansion poses a major public health threat, as a single bite can trigger alpha-gal syndrome, a life-altering allergy to red meat.You can explore the northern expansion of the lone star tick for yourself on Lone Star Tick: The Frontier - an impressive mapped visualization of citizen-science tick observations over

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Name that traffic cam!

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/06/2026 à 07:00

GeoGuessr has inspired countless spin-offs over the years, but NYCGuessr adds a clever twist to the formula by replacing Street View imagery with live traffic cameras from across New York City.The premise is simple. You're shown a live feed from an NYC traffic camera and have 40 seconds to work out where it is. Drop a pin on a map, submit your guess, and score points based on how close you are

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When AI Maps More Than Places

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 08/06/2026 à 08:55

Mapedia.ai AI is rapidly becoming one of the biggest trends in online mapping. Google Maps has been steadily rolling out its own AI-powered features, including its Gemini-powered conversational search tools. These allow users to find places using natural language queries such as "things to do on a rainy day" or "restaurants with a romantic atmosphere", helping people discover destinations

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The Cheap Eats Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/06/2026 à 09:00

With the cost of living becoming a major concern for many people, finding affordable places to eat has become increasingly important. While restaurant review platforms often emphasize ratings, trends, or premium dining experiences, there is relatively little focus on helping people quickly locate genuinely low-cost meal options. Fooglemap hopes to address this gap by making budget-friendly

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Project Hail Mary - Mapping the Astrophage

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/06/2026 à 07:26

Navigating the Stars of Project Hail Mary Warning: may contain spoilers for Project Hail MaryOne of the joys of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary is how convincingly it blends speculative science fiction with real astronomy. Val Hovey’s interactive Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart leans into that realism, using authentic data from the GAIA DR3 star survey to recreate the ship’s

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How Accurate Is Your Mental Globe?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 03/06/2026 à 07:40

Can you name the missing city in this diagram? If you can then you could be the potential daily champion of City Angle - a fun new geography puzzle game.If you think you know your global geography because you can point out Italy on a blank map, City Angle is here to completely shatter your confidence.At its core, this game flips the standard "point-and-click" map trivia template on its head.

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The Syphilis Blame Game

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/06/2026 à 08:33

Do you remember how during his first term Donald Trump kept calling Covid the "Chinese Virus"? This impulse to point fingers across borders is nothing new. When syphilis swept Europe after the 1495 Naples outbreak, no nation would own it. Instead, blame spread faster than an STD in a retreating French army platoon: the Russians called it the "Polish Disease," the Poles called it the "

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The Geography of Country Names

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 01/06/2026 à 08:02

There’s a pretty clear geographical split in what different countries call Greece. In most of Europe, the name comes from the Latin Graecia. But across North Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia, the name is usually derived from Ionia or Yunan, through Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and related linguistic influences. The split basically reflects two different historical contact routes:

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The White House's Conspiracy Theory Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 30/05/2026 à 08:49

The White House has launched a new interactive map intended to showcase ICE operations across the United States. Normally, the release of a government map would be a fairly mundane affair involving data sources, methodology notes, and perhaps a few carefully chosen statistics.However The Enemy Within appears to have been written by someone who spent the weekend binge-reading conspiracy

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Beyond the Data Dump: The AI-Curated Wiki Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/05/2026 à 09:01

At least once a week, I discover a new 'vibe-coded' interactive map that features geo-located Wikipedia articles. Most never get a mention on Maps Mania because they offer nothing different than what can already be seen on GeoCards, WhereWiki, Wiki Explore, Nearby Wiki, Wikimap, or the hundreds of other interactive maps listed under the Maps Mania Wiki label.LocalLore does have a USP which

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The Sunny Coffee Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/05/2026 à 07:27

There are lots of maps that can help you find a good cafe in Paris. But Sunny Coffee answers a much more important question: which café terraces are actually in the sun right now? Created by developer Paul Baron, Sunny Coffee is an interactive map that shows which Paris café terraces are currently sunny - and which are sitting in the shade. The map combines Paris open data, 3D

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The Ambient Sound Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/05/2026 à 08:24

Oto Fūkei - The Interactive Ambient Sound Map Oto fūkei (音風景) is a Japanese term meaning “soundscape” or “sound landscape”. It is the idea that places are not only defined by what they look like, but also by the sounds that shape our emotional perception of them. A narrow Tokyo alley has a very different sonic identity from a riverside park. A dense commercial district feels different from

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The New World Order - Mapped

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 26/05/2026 à 08:28

Atlas Absurdo If there is one thing we've learned in the 21st Century, it is that planet Earth is in need of some major reorganization. The first task in this global reshuffle? Reallocating the land each country owns based strictly on its population size.It is patently unfair that the most populous country - India - should be forced to squeeze into the world's 7th largest landmass. Under the "

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Metro Melodies

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/05/2026 à 09:06

I’ve developed a slight obsession with Tokyo's train station melodies. Known as Hassha Melodies (literally 'departure melodies'), these carefully composed seven-second jingles are designed to guide commuters onto departing trains on the city's vast, sprawling transit network.Before their introduction, Japanese stations used harsh electric buzzers to signal departures. In the late 1980s, new

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The Climate Physics of Planet Earth

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/05/2026 à 14:21

Building Earth is a new interactive map that explains how the Earth's climate has developed over millions of years through the lens of physics. The map strips the planet back to its absolute bare bones and then walks you through the four main developmental stages of the Earth - showing you how it gained an atmosphere, how wind currents began to move heat, and how the complex weather patterns we

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The Big Baguette Index

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/05/2026 à 07:38

The United States has The Economist’s Big Mac Index to measure purchasing power through burgers, but France now has a more culturally appropriate metric. Enter the Baguette Index, a data project that tracks and analyzes the price of the baguette de tradition to map the true cost of living across l'Hexagone.How the Data Was GatheredTo map out the geographic variations in the cost of France's most

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165M Jobs - Mapped One Dot at a Time

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/05/2026 à 08:32

If you zoom in on Las Vegas on the 165M US Jobs by Sector map you probably won't be surprised to discover that huge numbers of people in the city work in the Accommodation and Food sector, servicing the millions of tourists who visit Las Vegas every year.Kyle Walker's new interactive map, 165M US Jobs by Sector, visualizes the geographic distribution of jobs across the United States using a

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Time Traveling with OHM

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/05/2026 à 08:27

Today I've been playing with OpenHistoricalMap and exploring how it can be used to create a map that visualizes how a country's borders have changed over time.History is rarely static, but few nations illustrate the fluidity of borders quite like Poland. Over the last two centuries, the Polish state has expanded, contracted, and even physically shifted hundreds of miles across the European

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PubCrawlr - the Global Pub Crawl Generator

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 19/05/2026 à 09:56

If you want to plan your next wild night out then you need my new global pub crawl generator - PubCrawlr.The map lets you click anywhere in the world to instantly generate a walking pub crawl between nearby bars. You can also search for any city, neighborhood, or address using the built-in location search box.After selecting a location the app:Finds nearby barsOptimizes the walking orderDraws

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BizData API - An Open Alternative to Google Places

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/05/2026 à 07:30

The BizData API is a a new business search API built on OpenStreetMap data. Like the Google Places API, it allows developers to search for nearby restaurants, bars, hotels and other businesses. Unlike Google Places, however, BizData is completely free, requires no API key and no billing account.A typical BizData API request can return names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, coordinates and

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Drawing Custom Population Polygons

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/05/2026 à 08:14

Tom Forth’s Population around a Point is one of those wonderfully simple map tools that instantly invites exploration. Click anywhere on the map, choose a radius, and it estimates how many people live within that circle. Under the hood, it uses the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) population grid for 2024, querying population points stored in a massive SQLite database.Now

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The New Era of American Migration

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 15/05/2026 à 11:38

Last month, CORRECTIV released an interactive map, Where Europe’s Population is Shrinking, which visualizes Europe's general pattern of rural depopulation and the subtle trends of where European towns and regions are growing or shrinking.In the United States, you can explore similarly detailed population trends on cinyc’s 2025 Town Population Change map. This visualization tracks

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15 Minute Europe

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/05/2026 à 09:37

The 15 Minute City Score Europe Map shows how easy it is for people in European cities to reach everyday services - such as shops, schools, healthcare, parks, and public transport - within a 15-minute walk. Each colored dot on the map represents a small neighborhood-sized area. The color of the dot reflects that area’s “15 Minute City Score”: darker or warmer colors mean residents can

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METs Do the Time Warp Again

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/05/2026 à 07:51

NYC Commute POV takes the familiar geography of New York and stretches it into something far more emotionally accurate: a city shaped by time rather than distance.Inspired by classic transit cartograms, the map reimagines New York according to subway accessibility. Midtown Manhattan shrinks into a compact, hyper-connected core, while transit deserts balloon outward into distorted peripheries.

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Mapping 1,000s of Bike Trips Every Day

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/05/2026 à 07:30

The TfL cycle hire scheme has more than 12,000 bikes and 800+ docking stations across London. On average around 30,000 bicycle journeys a day are made using Transport for London’s Santander Cycles scheme - although on busy summer days the number of journeys can exceed 50,000 hires a day. Every one of those journeys leaves behind a small trail of data and London Cycle Hire turns that data into a

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Telling the Time with Street View

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/05/2026 à 07:40

Back in 2024 media artist Yufeng Zhao fed more than 8 million Google Maps Street View panoramas into a machine learning model that identifies and transcribes visible text. The result was All Text in NYC - a searchable archive of 138 million snippets of urban lettering gathered from graffiti, storefronts, bumper stickers, menus, flyers, billboards, and more. A search engine that turned the whole

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Trump II: The Debt Star Strikes Back

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/05/2026 à 08:09

With US public debt officially eclipsing 100% of GDP for the first time since the 1940s, the Trump administration is pivoting toward “high-impact” funding. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Department of War. Yesterday, the search for “little green men” took a giant leap forward with the release of “files related to alien and extraterrestrial life.”The release marks the debut of the

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When London Was on the Equator

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 08/05/2026 à 08:23

Trafalgar Square 320 million years ago If I could travel back in time to around 320 million years ago (about 318 million years before the first humans appeared) I would find the ground beneath my London home lying some 6 degrees south of the equator. Because of the slow movement of Earth’s tectonic plates over immense spans of time, the land I stand on today once occupied a latitude roughly

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Keyboard Free Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/05/2026 à 07:28

Map Gesture ControlsAlexFor most of us interactive maps are controlled with a mouse, a trackpad or touch gestures. However, some developers are exploring alternative ways to navigate maps without ever touching a keyboard or screen.Non-keyboard controls could prove especially useful for accessibility, allowing people with limited mobility to interact with maps more easily. Two recent

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Map Cam Selfie

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/05/2026 à 08:43

Map Cam Selfie If you’ve ever looked at a map of the United States and thought, "This would look better if it were a mosaic of my own face," then you’re in luck. You can now use Map Cam Selfie to superimpose your face on top of of the USA using the 3,000+ counties of the US as individual pixels for a live webcam feed.What is it?Map Cam Selfie is a browser-based experiment built using MapLibre

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Mapping the Jet Stream

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/05/2026 à 08:44

Ever since Cameron Beccario’s Earth.nullschool.net animated wind map was first released back in 2014 the 'particle flow map' aesthetic has become the gold standard for meteorological visualization. There is something inherently captivating about watching thousands of flowing particles trace the invisible currents of our atmosphere. Now, Netweather has joined the fray with their

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The World is Your Canvas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/05/2026 à 06:56

DrawonMaps is a fascinating new interactive map that turns urban infrastructure into an artistic medium. The premise is simple but technically impressive: you upload an image, and the map colors the city’s road network to recreate that image.How it WorksThe app leverages a modern stack - React 19, Deck.gl, MapLibre, and the Overpass API - to bridge the gap between image processing and geospatial

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Marble Madness

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/05/2026 à 08:23

My new map, the Terrain Marble Simulator, allows you to drop a digital marble anywhere in the world and watch it find its way home - or at least to the bottom of the nearest valley.How it Works: Physics in the BrowserThe simulator is built on MapLibre GL JS, utilizing a custom physics engine that runs in real-time within your browser. When you click the map, the application identifies your

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The Interstellar Travel Planner

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 01/05/2026 à 08:01

Have you ever woken up aboard an interstellar spacecraft with no idea how long it will take to get home to Earth? Then you need the Interstellar Map.This impressive browser-based visualization combines a 3D map of nearby stars with a relativistic travel-time calculator, allowing you to explore the practical consequences of planned journeys across interstellar space. The map plots thousands of

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Tracking & Mapping Private Cars in Real-Time

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 30/04/2026 à 06:57

OpenTrafficMap is a real-time animated map showing the movements of cars, trams and buses in Graz, Austria. It also shows the current status of all the city's smart traffic lights - displaying whether signals are red or green.What is OpenTrafficMap? Modern vehicles and road infrastructure increasingly use C-ITS (Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems), a wireless standard designed to improve

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Every Solar Eclipse This Century

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/04/2026 à 08:20

I’ve just discovered that my brother's house is right in the sweet spot for a total solar eclipse in August. Almost immediately afterwards I discovered that my mother has already bagged his spare room for the occasion.My solar eclipse discovery was made thanks to the Solar Eclipse Map, a smart new interactive tool that helps you explore the paths of every solar eclipse visible between 1900 and

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Historical GeoGuesssr

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/04/2026 à 07:55

WenWare is a fun, time-travel twist on GeoGuessr. The hook? You aren’t just guessing your location - you’re guessing the date.The game drops you into AI-generated panoramas of famous historical events, asking you to identify both the “where” and the “when.”Sounds simple enough, right? In practice, however, the game’s success feels tied to the modern era. While the Modern period features

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Is Your Home Too Close to a Road?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/04/2026 à 06:39

I live in a Victorian terrace in London where the houses lack front gardens, leaving my sitting room wall less than 10 feet from the road. While my street is quiet, this proximity to the curb makes noise pollution a constant threat in busier areas. To visualize this urban reality, OSM House to Street offers an interactive map that calculates the exact distance between building exteriors and the

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The World is Your Canvas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/04/2026 à 08:35

Pixtera is a brand new browser-based collaborative pixel art map that turns the whole world into a shared canvas. Built on MapLibre and OpenStreetMap data, it lets users zoom into real locations and start drawing directly onto the map in pixel form.New players begin with 100 free pixels in their energy store, which can be placed on the map one by one. Used pixels gradually regenerate at a

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Creating a Global Disco

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/04/2026 à 09:07

In February I experimented with ways to bring extruded buildings to life on a map using a range of visual effects. My Polygon Effects map focused on a single building, which lights up, oscillates, and changes color to create a series of animated displays.Rainbow now takes this idea worldwide. Zoom to almost any location on the Rainbow map and you can watch extruded 3D buildings pulse in

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Data as Art

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/04/2026 à 08:20

Yesterday I visited the new V&A museum at East Bank. In all honestly I was more impressed with the museum building than the actual exhibits but - for obvious reasons - I was drawn to Aaron Koblin's Flight Patterns visualization. Aaron Koblin's Flight Patterns BTW - if the V&A want me to curate an exhibition of Data Art I am always available: earth :: a global map of wind

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Where Europe Is Emptying

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/04/2026 à 07:43

CORRECTIV’s latest story map, Where Europe’s Population is Shrinking, is a superb example of how large-scale spatial data and clear visual design can come together to tell a nuanced geographic story. In this case, the story is one of Europe’s rural depopulation and how emigration and demographic decline have reshaped entire regions since the end of the Cold War.The map draws on newly harmonised

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Address to Impress

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/04/2026 à 07:38

There are already loads of online tools available to help you create your own map posters. Many of these, such as Mapiful and Mapness, allow you to design your poster, pay a fee, and receive a high-quality print by mail.However, you can also use these free alternatives to create and print your own customized map posters at home:Figuregrounder prettymapp MapToPoster JS

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The First Systematic Survey Meets Modern DEM

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/04/2026 à 07:05

Mapterhorn is an open-source terrain data pipeline. Its core idea is deceptively simple: take the best available open elevation datasets from around the world, normalize them, and deliver them as a single, seamless, web-ready product.From this unified dataset, Mapterhorn provides a ready-to-use map tile service designed for modern web mapping workflows. The terrain is packaged into PMTiles

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Google Night View

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/04/2026 à 08:16

To ensure the highest quality Street View imagery for navigation, Google almost exclusively captures the world in broad daylight. But as any seasoned map-nerd knows, every system has its glitches. La Noche Cíclica is a fascinating Google Map project that highlights the rare, eerie, and often accidental moments when Street View goes dark. You can view the project's documented night views simply

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Drop a Message in a Bottle

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/04/2026 à 07:54

Unstoried: Send a Message in a Bottle is a beautifully simple idea executed as a playful WebGL globe: a place where anyone can drop a virtual message into the ocean and see what drifts back from strangers around the world.Unstoried is meant to be a modern, planet-scale revival of early web guestbooks - except instead of signing a page, you cast a single bottle adrift upon a virtual 3D globe and

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what1tune - Musical Addresses

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/04/2026 à 09:25

Over the years, we’ve seen countless ways to navigate our world using various geohashing solutions. These systems - such as the popular what3words (which assigns three random words to every 3-meter square), or Google’s Plus Codes - aim to provide a simplified, human-readable way to identify precise locations where traditional street addresses fall short, such as in

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The Ebb and Flow of a City in Motion

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 15/04/2026 à 07:29

NYC Riders is a striking animated map that visualizes the 4.3 million NYC subway trips taken on an average Wednesday in September 2025. The map uses scaled circles to show trains moving on the network based on the MTA timetable. The size of the circles is determined by how many (estimated) passengers are on each train.As you watch the animation unfold, the daily rhythm of the city becomes

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Scrabble Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/04/2026 à 07:24

Apparently yesterday was International Scrabble Day, and to celebrate the occasion the Map Design Commission of the International Cartographic Association decided to create a Scrabble Map for its #365DaysOfMaps Campaign.Scrabble Map is a very simple but also quite addictive map game. A country is randomly selected, and players are given a scrambled set of letters. Your task? Drag and arrange

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How Livable is Your Street?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/04/2026 à 07:08

Strado is a new interactive mapping tool designed to provide objective livability scores for 50 major European cities, powered entirely by OpenStreetMap data. By clicking on any street on the Strado map, users receive a Livability Score and an Activity Score derived from an assessment of 22 different categories.How it WorksStrado analyzes the density of Points of Interest (POIs) to rank

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This Map Finds Cities Everyone Can Fly To

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/04/2026 à 07:50

Over the years there have been many attempts to create interactive maps that help friends discover the best place to meet - somewhere roughly equidistant from all their starting points. Tools like Whatshalfway have become popular for exactly this reason, offering a simple way to find a convenient halfway location.These tools work well if you’re walking, cycling or driving. But they quickly fall

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Legible Rude Places Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 10/04/2026 à 08:53

This morning I was browsing Gary Gale's Vaguely Rude Places map and realised that thanks to my deteriorating eye-sight I could no longer read all the hilariously rude place-names around the world. Instead of simply diving into my browser settings and magnifying the page I decided it would be far more satisfying to create my own map. Luckily for me Gary has provided links to easily download the

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11 Million Colored Buildings

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/04/2026 à 07:52

If there were an Interactive Mapping Hall of Fame, Bert Spaan’s Netherlands Building Age map would undoubtedly hold a place of honor. In 2013, Spaan achieved the monumental task of mapping 9,866,539 individual building footprints across the country. By utilizing a vibrant, data-driven color palette, he created a visual standard that not only captured the public’s imagination but also inspired a

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The Ancestry Dot Map of America

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 08/04/2026 à 08:25

Inspired by Census Dots the interactive racial dot map of the 2020 U.S. Census - the Ancestry Dot Map applies a similar visual language to a different, and arguably more nuanced, dataset: reported ancestry.Like its predecessor, the Ancestry Dot Map uses colored dots scattered across the landscape of the United States. But instead of visualizing race at the individual level, each dot here

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The World in Motion

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/04/2026 à 08:04

This animated map displays worldwide air temperatures over the past week. It illustrates how temperatures shift daily, warming progressively from east to west as the Sun rises and sets across the globe.You might also be able to spot other patterns, such as the effects of jet streams, periods of intense summer heat, and sharp temperature drops during winter when polar air moves southward.Recently

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The Politics of Street View

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/04/2026 à 07:21

I’m really bad at BallotGuessr. The object of the game is very simple: you’re shown a Street View image and have to use the visual clues to decide whether the area voted Republican or Democrat - think GeoGuessr for psephology fans.If BallotGuessr were set in the UK, I’m confident I could correctly guess how a neighbourhood votes 99% of the time. But in the U.S., I really

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200,000 Rivers Run Through It

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/04/2026 à 07:30

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has published a fascinating visualization exploring the language of rivers in the United States - a map that doesn’t just show waterways, but the words we use to describe them. Their Map that Glows with the Vocabulary of Water reveals how terms like arroyo, bayou, creek, and marsh are not randomly distributed, but instead cluster in ways that reflect the

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ASCII Mapping of Live Data

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/04/2026 à 07:46

There’s something oddly satisfying about seeing the world reduced to text. The new ASCII OSM Viewer  leans fully into that aesthetic, turning modern web mapping into something that looks like it belongs on a terminal from the 1980s.Built by Lionel Lim, this browser-based experiment takes data from OpenStreetMap and renders it entirely using ASCII characters. The result is a playful but

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